Print this article FMS FEATURE ARTICLE...January 30, 2004OSCARS and BAFTAS and GLOBES  OH MY!A summary of the major film music award nominees for 2003by Phil Grayson

The Oscar nominations for Best Original Score and Song for 2003 have been announced, and the choices of the Motion Picture Academy's music branch are interesting by comparison with those of the other high-profile organizations that honor composers and songwriters.

Nominated for Oscars in the Original Score category are:

Danny Elfman, Big Fish

Gabriel Yared, Cold Mountain

Thomas Newman, Finding Nemo

James Horner, House of Sand and Fog

Howard Shore, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Nominated in the Original Song category are:

"Into the West" from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Howard Shore, Fran Walsh, Annie Lennox)

"A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow" from A Mighty Wind (Michael McKean, Annette O'Toole)

"The Triplets of Belleville" from The Triplets of Belleville (Benoit Charest, Sylvain Chomet)

"You Will Be My Ain True Love" from Cold Mountain (Sting)

Shore won two Golden Globes on January 25, as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association honored the final Lord of the Rings film with both song and score awards. The other nominees for Original Score were:

Elfman, Big Fish

Yared, Cold Mountain

Alexandre Desplat, Girl With a Pearl Earring

Hans Zimmer, The Last Samurai

The other Golden Globe Song nominees were:

"The Heart of Every Girl" from Mona Lisa Smile (Elton John, Bernie Taupin)

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) nominees for the Anthony Asquith Award for Achievement in Film Music are:

Yared, Cold Mountain

Desplat, Girl With a Pearl Earring

The RZA, Kill Bill, Vol. 1

Shore, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Kevin Shields, Lost in Translation

The BAFTA list is an odd mix of the predictable (Yared, Desplat, Shore) with the out-of-left-field. There is almost no original music in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill  hip-hop artist RZA estimated six cues of varying lengths  and the score in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation is virtually indistinguishable from the Japanese hotel Muzak that dominates the soundtrack.

BAFTA has no category for original songs. Those awards will be handed out February 15 in London.

A Shore win for song, score, or both, at the Academy Awards on February 29 could help compensate for the Academy's failure to nominate his music for The Two Towers last year. He won the previous year for his music for The Fellowship of the Ring, the first film in the trilogy.